Slow MP3 Players
I finally realized why the track-to-track seek time is so awful on my car CD player when playing MP3s. Metadata for MP3 files can be stored in two places. There's the ID3v1 "standard", which slaps 128 bytes onto the end of the file. There's also ID3v2, which puts the information in the beginning of the file. My car CD player wants to display track information to show off the OLED display. The player only looks for ID3v1 tags, so it always has to read the last 128 bytes of the file to see if they're an ID3v1 header. It then has to seek back to the beginning of the track to get the audio data. D'oh! I wonder if more recent players recognize ID3v2 gracefully and skip this step. Of course, that would slow down the playback of tracks that only have ID3v1. *sigh*